Directors commentary editing lesson 3

Today we finished Inserting all the clips we had into the commentary. We couldn't put all of the in clips in because some of them disappeared. Also we had to put in our images  of the dolly and the camera in again cos they had been deleted.
We had even more problems with our time to edit because the rendering for it took TOO LONG!
We also made the green screen bits see through and edited the music so the viewer can listen to it during the bits where there is no commentary.
We didn't have time to edit the music in so we just uploaded it without the music.

Directors commentary editing lesson 2

We continued editing our commentary with a few new ideas in mind. One of ideas was to put in some key frames to create moving images and make the commentary more interesting to watch. Also we decided to import some images of our ancillary to remind the audience what it looked like while it is being commented about. Other images we imported into the commentary of the video included: A picture of the HD camera and a camera dolly. TO make the clips of us not look like they appear out of nowhere we made sure they faded in.

While editing we encountered many problems for example all our clips moved around :( This gave us less time to finish our commentary :(. We also lost a couple of clips that we were going to use to comment on the video. Also we spent half the lesson watching our clips render.

Directors commentary editing lesson 1

We started off by copying our final project file and then we imported all the commentary clips into it. Once we had done this we started to overlay the commentary clips onto the music video -as we have the green screen background we have a number of option as to how we position and use our commentary. We could either simply overlay the clips onto the music video without cropping them or re-positioning them and getting rid of the green screen so that the video is playing in the background. Or we could alternatively overlay the commentary clips over the video and resize them, reposition them, and crop them so that they only take up a small proportion of the screen as well as changing the green screen so that it is invisible for the music video to be able to play in the background.

We have decided that we will either get rid of the music video audio completely or just have it quite quiet so that the commentary is the audiences main focus.

As we all only have fairly limited skills in FinalCut so working out the approach we are going to take to create our director's commentary took us a while.

Directors commentary example: Chris Phillips video for Lady Sovereign - A Little Bt of Shh

Director's Commentary: 

Evaluation Questions

1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenege forms and conventions of real media products?

·         Conventions: cutting on the beat (especially in the rap scene)

·         Fast editing, on the beat for the rap scenes

·         Slow editing, plans, overlays for the Adele scenes

·         Inspiration came from Kanye 'All of the Lights' and Adele 'Someone Like You' as they are both in part or all in black and white

·         These also gave us the idea for the walking whilst singing the song - almost as if the artist is telling the story to the audience

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

·         The combination creates an overall look for the package that is complete, relateable to Adele's previous products and to each other

·         They are simple and easy on the eye

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

·         Our idea was well liked

·         Following Adele's stereotypical conventions

·         We could have used better lighting

·         The acting for the Adele part could have been improved

·         Better costumes could have been used

·         The locations were well chosen

·         We could have had more varied camera angles

·         The actor for Kanye could have done better lip syncing

·         The performance from the Kanye actor was well recieved

4. How did you use new technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

·         Blogger for research and planning

·         Youtube - for uploading videos and to be able to include them on our blog

·         FinalCut - for editing our footage

·         Photoshop - for editing our digipack

·         HD Camera - Gave us good quality footage

Stacey's Evaluation Notes

• Adele's video style - good connection with artist's previous videos
• Lip syncing is good and done promptly, esecially on the first few seconds when the vocals start straight away.
• First split screen could be smoother
• Overlays at the beginning are good and create an interesting effect
• Some editing is slightly off the best and could have been finer so that it is on the beat
• Some of the camera work is shakey where we have cropped the frame and zoomed in on the footage
• Zooming in/ cropping has made some of the footage pixelated in some sections (this can't really be helped by us)
• Black and white is effective and emotive
• Fade on violin section is good
• Slightly shakey footage on last Kanye shot
• Costumes are popular and relateable for the audience
• Black and white creates a mellow atmosphere and uses features from 'Someone like you'
• The split screens and overlays makes the footage more interesting, upto date and modern
• Rappers location is conventional
• Some cutting is on the beat and emphasises the cuts

Today's Lesson [Friday 2nd December]

In our lesson today we will be filming our directors commentary from our script, but we can't read directly from it as it ruins the flow of the footage. We are filming in the green room which gives us the opportunity to edit the music video into the background of our directors commentary, even though we haven't planned to and will be experimental. This is an advantage as the other groups are filming in white and black rooms which doesn't give the opportunity as white and black colours are more common than green.

In our script we divided it up equally between all 3 speakers by going through each one as:
Jake: ...........
Stacey: ............
Ruri: ............

Jake: ............

This allows the audience to not be bored and stay engaged with the directors commentary.

Tuesday's Lesson

During our lesson we worked on our directors commentary and made notes that will help us prepare the final script.

Evaluation questions

1.

• Our media project uses many of the media conventions used by real media products.
• The conventions it uses are common in real music videos of the pop genre.
• Although the conventions in pop music videos are broad they all follow the Goodwin points

1. Intertextuality: Our music video is partly filmed in black and white and this may give references to old films like Casablanca. It is also set in Cambridge and shows some of the famous landmarks there such as in the film Chariots of Fire. Another example of intertextuality is the way the rapper is shown; he's shown the same way he is portrayed in his own music videos in which he wears modern clothes and the editing is experimental with all the split screens and jump cuts.
2. Link between music and visuals: Our music video has strong links between music and visuals as every shot in it is cut to the beat which is done in a lot of pop videos such as Adele's - Rolling in the Deep. Also the stronger notes in the music are complemented in the video with brighter scenes in colour.
3. Lyrics and visuals: Our music video follows these in many ways. Kanye West refers to some lyrics with hand gestures while Adele looks sad when she's singing sad lyrics. There aren't many direct links between our music video and the lyrics. But there still are some subtle links between them; some of these include the setting and effects used in the video. All of these being quite mellow and sad locations and effects (black and white) which suit the lyrics very well. However links between lyrics and the music video aren't that important as it's not something you see in pop music videos very often. It's not one of the main genre conventions  in pop music videos.
4. Genre conventions: Our music video follows some of the pop genre conventions. These bein included in:

• The costumes the artists are wearing which are fashionable popular clothes that are very fitting with pop music videos.
• The editing of the video as it is very heavy on it including lots of shots and angles of the artist.

     5. Demands of the record label: Many pop videos have visible features that are demanded by the           

         record label wether it for advertising a certain brand or giving an image to the artist. Or music video 

         doesn't advertise any particular brands but it does give a certain image of the artists. For example: 

         Adele is shown as an emotional relaxed girl with a powerful voice whereas Kanye is shown as a

         fun upbeat character.

     6. One of the features of pop music videos is voyeurism: This is when music videos show

         controversial things that perhaps the viewer shouldn't see. Or recorded from the point of view of 

         someone or through a camera. Our music video doesn't really show any of these characteristics as

         it is a sad song and controversial content is not something you tend to see in any of the artist's past

        music videos.

Our music video has used many of the conventions of a generic pop video and has not developed or challenges any conventions as we wanted to make it as much like music video as possible.

2.
     Our combination of all our products work very well toguether as a promotional package as they all suit eachother and promote the artist very well.

All the products create the same image of the main artist - Adele. In the music video she is filmed in black and white in a graveyard where she is portrayed as a hurt, sad and emotional person because of her expression and the feelings sung in the lyrics of the song. The digi pack and the advert aren't to different as they both show Adele's face in the same melancoly mood looking away from the camera, in a dark room with a light in the background.The adverts and digipack also included good reviews, bonus features (live performance, interview) and the artists name in bold simple letters to make Adele seem like an artist everyone knows, who doesn't need fancy letters to stand out, who is well respected in the reviews and isn't afraid to share with her fans via interviews. For these reasons the advert, digi pack and video work very well together as a promotional package. And will make the artist successful at attracting the target audience.

3.

     What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

The audience feedback we received throughout the writing, filming and editing of our music video proved to be essential as the music video wouldn't be the same with out it.

We received our first audience feedback after our initial pitch. Although we didn't get a lot of feedback initially it proved to be very useful for the filming of our video. Most of the audience liked our pitch and idea saying that it followed the conventions of a typical pop music video. We also received some constructive criticism regarding who was going to play Adele for which we had no answer for at the time but made us conscious that it was a decision that needed to be made soon enough. Another important part of our feedback was about what lighting we were going to use for the filming of half our music video. This led to us having to buy a powerful torch which we later didn't use because of some delays in our filming.

After filming our music video and making a rough-cut of it we were given another feedback from our peers and teachers. We received a balance of positive and negative feedback. Some of the most common and most important reviews we got included:

• The lip syncing needing some improvements. (We solved this later by tweaking the timing of the clips and matching particular words with particular movements to make the lip syncing look more in sync.
• We were told that the first 60 seconds of our music video dragged on quite a bit. (to stop this from happening we then added some other footage of different locations, put some effects into it such as fading, split screens and ghosting, making the video more interesting to the viewer without losing the style of the music video.
• There were also some small things people pointed out such as the dogs in the background of one of the shots (which we solved by cropping the size of the frame to exclude the dogs from the image)
• We were told that the acting by Adele wasn't very good compared to the performance by Kanye and that the costumes weren't very good. (There wasn't much we could do about this because these were present throughout most of the music video) 

We also received some good feedback such as: Kanye West's performance being outstanding, Good variety of locations and shots, good lighting and effective cuts and transitions.

script for director's commentary

Script for director’s commentary

Introduction:
Jake: Hi, I’m Jake, and my role was editor/camera-man
Ruri: Hi, I’m Ruri, and my role was editor/Producer
Stacey: Hi, I’m Stacey, and my role was editor and Adele.

Ruri: This is our Music Video, Adele – Melt my heart to stone

Jake: First of all you can notice the footage is in black and white for the opening this is as a result of our initial feedback as the footage was originally in colour and wasn’t fitting to the backing track and style of the song and artist. As in her other music videos such as Someone Like You the editor has used a de-saturation effect on the footage.

Stacey: The split screen was fairly difficult to edit, as we hadn’t used this technique before. It uses some of the conventions of real media products, such as soul-pop music videos uses these editing techniques, such as Beyonce music video, ‘Countdown’.

 

Ruri: As you can see the close-ups of the gravestone represent sorrow and a mellow atmosphere towards Adele, this is effective because it combines with our ancillary texts, due to them being dark and relating to death as the font colours are red and the background is black, which represents sad feelings and will relate to our target audience aged 18 to 25years old females, and most have been through tough relationships, therefore it relates.

 

Stacey: By wearing popular clothing it is relatable to our audience as it isn’t out of the ordinary and is accessible to all in the audience, however our feedback from rough cut thought we should of worn more flamboyant clothing as Adele wears dresses in some of her music videos. But as producers we wanted our music video to relate to the audience and connect with them.

 

Jake: The footage in our music video is of very high quality as we used new technology to construct an experimental music video, this is as a result of using the HD camera. However we received feedback from our peers that the footage was too shake but we couldn’t use the new technology such as the dolly to track Adele, because it wouldn’t have worked on the un-even ground.

 

Ruri: In this section we used the new technology from the new software FinalCut of overlays that were in colour, to make the footage more interesting. We did this because our rough cut feedback commented that the footage was “boring”. We are certain that we have fixed this problem, with the overlays we used and the addition of colour.

 

Jake: In this section, you can really notice how we cut on the beat of the music, this emphasises the backing track instead of the vocals, which is important, as this is a convention used in Adele’s music videos. Also it creates a fluid flow and makes its un-messy.

 

Stacey: By using panning it allows us to include a wider shot and a wider angle, this also adds more variety of shots. Also we used the new technology of tripods to create a steady pan. The locations we used for the panning was reflective and a great addition to our music video as they created an ambient feeling.

 

Ruri: We use the amazing new technology of FinalCut which allowed us to cut precisely to the nearest millisecond, to create a powerful transition between the two artists in our music video.

Jake: Due to Kanye West being really enthusiastic and animated we decided to emphasize this through the editing and create several split screens. By doing this we made the video itself more interesting for the audience.

Stacey: The costume for Kanye West was quite stereotypical to what a rapper wears, but at the same time it is something that the audience will wear so it makes the video more relatable to the audience.

Ruri: By using overlays and pans of the city landscape we are able to create an interesting section of the video whilst there are no vocals for the audience to listen to.

Jake: The ending of the music video is visualised by the music, this is because Kanye West ends up walking away on the scene where he raps which gives a signal to the audience that it's the closing of the song or near the end.

Stacey: Also the trend of cutting on the beat happens at the last beat of the music video where it suddenly stops on the loud beat which signals the end of the song.

Ruri: Thats all from us, thank you for watching and listening.

Directors commentary notes:

1. 0 to 9 secs in

• First of all you can see a close up of Adele wearing regular clothes which makes most people relate with her. Q1
• Its filmed in black and white which gives it an old fashioned style which is very fitting with the mood of the song, uses features of someone like you. Q1, Q3 (feedback said it was
• Lip syncing good for quick start.
• Split screen makes footage more interesting and experimental.
• Location makes the scene interesting
• Overlay makes it interesting 
• to colour- sun spot- contrasting, introduces rappers location 
• cutting on the spot

evaluation questions for directors commentary

1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenege forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product uses the convention sof real media products, as it uses some of Goodwin's points. The music links in with the visuals, such as the cutting on the beat, and cutting more often on th ebeat during the rap scene. Another link between visuals and music is the fading scenes panning which represnts the mellow scene.
The genre of our song is indie-rock but we had a rap scene which clashes with the rap scene. Howeveer we did follwo the Genre conventions ofr Indie-rock. Scnes with Adele used genre conventions to create the use of mellow settings to represent Adele's feelings and emotions. But we didn't for the rap scenes, except the editing techniques of cutting fast, and on the beat.
When we analysed Ade'es song 'somone like you' we got inspiration for some of the music video, such as the walking and lip-syncing scenes, the black and white (desaturation) filter effect, and also the panning of mellow secenes which all featuered in Adele's music video we analysed, which influenced some of our editing and creation techniques.
But when we analysed one of Kanye West's music videos we didnt get much inspiration as he uses flsahing lights too often in most of his music videos. However Kanye West does cut on the beat while walking and rapping and rap actions fluently. Which we took into consideration in our planning and ended up using in our rap scene.

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
The combination of the music video, DVD cover and magazine advert createes an effective promotional package, due to the advert and the DVD cover representing Adele in a mellow look, which follows Adele's trend of sadness and simple covers.
The music video works well combined as the song relates to death and broken hearts. Which the red font represents on the cover and the Advert, so the video promotes that with a sad feeling to the music video of mellow scenes etc. Therefore the combination is succesful.
The target audience is young female adults aged around 18 to 30years old, where the song may relate to them and their relationship experience. As the cover and advert represents Adele as heartbroken, which will attract the target audience therefore the combination of ancillary texts and the main product is succesful together, moreover the music represents the visuals in a sad atmosphere and apperance, which is very effective. But Adele is not in black and white on the ancillary texts, which is different to the main product which doesn't portray her as sad as strong in the music video.

3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?From our audience feedback, on the initial pitched everyone liked our idea as we followed Adele's stereotypicl convetions and her other music videos which are major hits world wide e.g. ' somone like you '. But they gave us some extra ideas to use lightning that are appropiate, and needed to create a succesful music video of our genre. Moreover the feedback on our rough cut was varied. I learnt that the actress who plaid as Adele needed to have more appropiate costumes that represent Adele more succesful then we did. Also the facial expressions and attitude needs to look more enthusiastic as Adele always moving her arms and has alto of facil expressions, which us used to create a succesful music video, even if it's a mellow song.
Also the lip-syncing is vital to create the succesful music video, as there was a contrast of amazing actign by actor, and poor by actress, and some parts had good lip-syncing but some were bad, which affected our music videos overall perofmrance in our rough cut. From our Final Cut adience feedback I learnt that it's vital to have good editing techniques such as our fading to create an effective music video. It's also important to have a variety of acmera angels as it helps promote the artist, whichi  learnt from our audience feedback

4. How did you use new technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The new media technology we used for resaerch and planning was 'blogger'. We used then by creating posts, where we embedded pictures, youtube videos and our own uploaded videos. This helped us progress our ideas for our music video and look back over the ideas with easy navigation to change ideas and keep using them.
Another new technology is FinalCut which allowed us to edit our footage as it has many effects available, which also had easy techniques of editing. This easiness allowed layers to be created and locked, which alloed us to do safe but fast editing and be succesful then other editing program like windows movie maker.  This allowed our product to be succesful at the end of our music video in our 'final cut'. Another tool we used in FinalCut was the fading tool which allowed us to create our effective mellow scenes which panned and faded throughout. We also used FinalCut in our evaluation to edit our clips, it allowed easy editing of sound and video clips, but we didnt use quicktime of the music video we used the layers therefore we didn't have enough time to put the music in which will lose us marks. But it had a easier feature then other editing programs like Adobe, due to us using the 'chromakeyer' which allowed us to get rid of our background.
Moreover a new media technology we used in the construction of our ancillary texts is Adobe Photoschop which is more advanced compared to programs such as 'paint' and 'GIMP', due to being able to use the same font as Adele and alot of editing techniques, filters and tools. As we used the tool ' Refine Edges' which created our ancillary texts image of Adele and made it megre into the light and black background, therefore this media technology allowed us to create a succesful product.
An important new technology we used to construct the whole music video was the HD camera, it allowed us to focus on still objects, as well as keeping focus on moving objects. There was a downside of this camera we used, as you can notice the shakiness more then a non-hd camera during it to be in 1080pixels isntead of 360/480pixels. But we could crop images and zoom into certain parts while editing but keeping a high resolution still, which can be seen in our high quality version of the music video.
Overall the new techologies we used to construct, research/planning and evaluating our music video project, were of very high quality and gave us alot of different opportunities we could experiment with. Which in result created a very high quality music video in return of these great tools of technology.

DIrectors commentary

Directors commentaries are recorded commentaries that are recorded by the director. The commentary is recorded on top of the final cut or an edited version of whatever the director who is commentating has released ( feature film, music video) .  This commentary is usually released along with the DVD or Digipack of the film or music video that has been commentated on. People like to watch directors commentaries because they might be interested in how the film was made and want to hear about the stories backstage. Others may want to watch it for entertainment depending on the directos humour and who he does the commentary with. Most of the time directors commentaries are done with someone else involved with the film, this could be an actor or one of the camera men to give a different insight into the film.
Directors commentaries can be presented in different ways:

• scene-specific: which is done over specific scenes of the film. Usually involves a lot more editing and planing.
• screen-specific. Where the audio recording is done over the full final version of the film, recorded in one take.

directors commentary homework

A director's commentary is a audio commentary by the director on the CD or DVD as a bonus feature. Normally the commentary consists of more than on production member where they watch the watch the film and give a lecture or comment, which sometimes plays in-time with the video/film.
They sometimes add a different type of commentating by being serious or entertaining by nature, however the commentary sometimes gives information that wouldn't be disclosed to the audience. Sometimes during the commentary they commentate certain scenes and show how the scenes were made, this is sometimes done by step-by-step stages which are commentated on.

DVD cover

Digipack

Front cover:
For the front cover we put in picture of Adele we took especially for our digipack. The picture shows a close-up of Adele's face with a dark background  and a bright light behind her. The picture follows artists media conventions as the song in the Digipack is quite a sad song and the picture goes with that mood. It also goes with the mood of the music video and the conventions Adele uses for her album and single covers.
On the front we also included the artist's name in white letters and the title of the digipack in red being 'melt my heart to stone' . We chose to only write these on the front cover to make the digipack a lot more simplistic whit makes it look more prestigious and sophisticated.
The simplicity of the front cover will make shoppers interested and want to know a lot more. 

The spine: On the Spine we wrote the Artists name and the digipack name in the same style as the album cover. We chose to write them the same style in the same bold font to stop it from looking out of place and to make it fit in with the rest of the design.

Back cover:
For the back cover we decided to add a lot more than the front cover.

Magazine Advert

The frame didn't cut out the edges so it looks a bit rough in some places.

digipack examples from previous years

Music Video Promo Package Examples

Some of the slides in this slideshare have really good examples of digipacks such as on slide 14 they managed to create posters/bonus cd's/photographs extra for their digipack which would create bonus points. Moreover from this the dvd cover is really effective the images have been smoothed onto the background so it looks like it just hasn't been placed their and out of place with the use of lighting and shadowing of layers and images.

This adele poster/magazine advert has some of the features in our magazine advert such as the same font style, and the album/single name in different colou, so we have the same font styleaswell as adeles face emerging from the black with a contrast.

22/11/2011 digipack editing/creating

In todays lesson we did 50% of the album/dvd cover, where we had to fix the render edges as the tool was playing up so we applied it to the current layer and copied it onto a new layer to apply the affect which we had to do twice to make the affect show.

Lastly we did the magazine advert and used the same style as the dvd cover but we nearly finished the madgazine advert.

Digipack photoshoot. 21 11 11

In today's lesson we when to the dark room to take some pictures for our digipack cover. Our main Idea was to take some close ups of Adele's face with a dark background. To make our picture more interesting we experimented with some flash lights. The use of flashlights till create an effect such as the imge below

however in our digipack we will have adeles face emerging from the black on the front and kanye west's face emerging from the black on the back of the dvd cover, it'll take quite alot of editing and effects to merge the iamge in but it will create an effect cover and follows Adele's style of covers.